Empty rooms and routine

One of the reasons that I have been recently motivated to post on this blog again is that my first semester at university this year is over and, consequently, I have a lot of free time. This free time usually comes at a cost, however, as studying at university means regularly participating in an intellectual environment, entering a thought space which - especially in art - encourages the relating and comparing of different concepts which I wouldn't otherwise associate with one another outside of this thought space, leaving me alone in the bedroom of inertia, with its musk in my nostrils. There's a lot to be said for relaxing, but that just means I don't have to spend three hours a day on public transport anymore, I don't intend on developing Alzheimers or juvenile dementia.

What I mean to say by this is that I have come, over the last year and a half, into certain situations which require a consistently active mind without one, and I've struggled to catch up. I'd imagine it's a familiar narrative for most people - you don't regularly use your mind in one way and when you're forced to you almost give up. It was a struggle for me to write the last essay for the Visual Culture unit because, as well as not reading very regularly since the start of the year, I hadn't written anything in ages, not even on the websites I visit frequently (my patronage of Answerbag has shifted to Facebook, which encourages a greater use of the mouse than the keyboard in using it). This blog, too, has been hard to kickstart again and, on the simplest level, it's because I don't have anything to write about - or anything cohesive to write about. Thoughts and opinion develop after talking to other people or reading things but they dissipate and I move onto something else. Knowing you're going to write a post later in the day (or a bit after midnight) forces you to keep the old water circulating in the bath, even though I'd rather rinse it out and fill it up again with something a little less colourful and detailed, or perhaps even just have a shower, and that means concentrating and analysing and all sorts of other things not traditionally associated with relaxation. At least, that's what it means for me - I'm sure there are plenty of people who can cruise through the day and improvise something in five minutes - I'm trying to figure out how to do that without turning each post into free association.

Anyway, I've decided I'm going to try and keep a routine during the break that'll avoid the inertia society wants me to fall into. I'm going to try and read 20 pages of a book, listen to five or six songs (by three different artists), spend some time on the internet, and watch a film (that's not going to be easy). I read 20 pages from Women, Art & Society after I got up and it gave me enough thought space to avoid leaning my conscience on one or two stalactites of negativity that show up as I walk through the cave (and I'm thinking Donkey Kong). And I think reading some facts about history, followed by some systematic analyses, helps you along when you spend most of the day with no idea what you're talking about. I get stressed less (although I still get some), and I live longer because stress kills you, as Dick Gregory has explained. So now, after I finish writing this, I can go to bed clear headed, and that means I'll wake up with a better idea of how to get out of bed and adjust.

I watched Inglorious Basterds for the second time tonight, and I realised that, while it is a lot of fluff dressed up in subtitles and long sequences of people trying to be polite to weirdos, its themes are pretty real and the technical 'seriousness' backs that up. It's subversive in the sense that it's about ordinary people causing violence against the people who would normally kill them, and how people who kill a lot of people get away with it, and how horrible that is. Hitler may have killed himself, but Eichmann survived for a while, and other mass murderers, like Zia ul-Haq, never had to face a court or execution, neither did Stalin, or Reagan, and Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates will probably never have to. And Tarantino can be irreverent, with close-ups of strudel and cream, if he wants because you can do that if you're annoyed and you're an artist. It's better than being patronising. I've been thinking about those associations and why it's satisfying to watch a lot of violence, and you become aware of a lot of weird subconscious processions when you've got the space to think about them. And I'd rather be aware of them if it means I'm going to not walk out in front of a moving car or step on a cat.

I'm only saying this because I think it's important to establish a context when you try to talk to people, with whatever application or lack of subtlety, because it's honest and it gives people room to consider what you're saying. I guess it's also self-orientation, but it gives me something to write about. Sorry about all the sentences starting with 'I'.